January 2011

by Paul I. Wellman. Doubleday & Company. 402 pp. $6.

Mr. Wellman undertakes here to compress into one volume four centuries of the colorful history of the American Southwest, and very well he does it, too. He begins with Coronado’s fabulous march, discusses the gaudy colonial era in New Mexico, traces the adventures of early French venturers and explorers, and considers the genesis, growing pains and final incarnation of the great empire of Texas, with side-glances at Indian wars and cattle-country extravaganzas.

by Wallace Nutting. The Macmillan Company. $10.95.

This seven and one-half pound volume includes all of the 5,000 illustrations of the original Furniture Treasury , first published in 1928 and reissued in 1948. It is the authoritative picture book on American antiques for both the amateur and the professional.

by Russell Lynes. Harper and Brothers. $5.

Taste, says Mr. Lynes, who is managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is “our personal delight, our private dilemma and our public facade.” No one, certainly, has written on this intricate subject more entertainingly or more profoundly than the creator of “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” and Mr. Lynes takes his place beside the late Dixon Wecter and the late Frederick Lewis Alien as a first rank social historian. He has scanned the sources of our taste, private and public, from about 1830 to the present, and has created an extremely valuable survey of American art and architecture in its formative years.

Johnny Appleseed: Man & Myth , by Robert Price. Indiana University Press. $5. A biography of an American folk hero, John Chapman, known to all as “Johnny Appleseed” for the work he did in clearing land and planting seeds throughout the Middle West.

Indians of the Plains , by Robert H. Lowie. McGraw-Hill Book Company. $4.75. A handbook on the culture of the first inhabitants of the Western Great Plains, richly illustrated by 105 pictures and diagrams.

George Washington: Patriot and President, Vol. VI , by Douglas Southall Freeman. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $7.50. The last of Dr. Freeman’s opus, completed before his death. It deals with Washington up to the age of 61, his travels in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the South, and his becoming the country’s first President.

Houses Virginians Have Loved , by Agnes Rothery. Rinehart & Company. $7.95. A book of houses, dating back to Colonial times, that represent our American heritage. Illustrated with 100 photographs.

The gray, water-soaked, mud-stained skeleton of one of America’s first warships has been raised from the bottom of Lake Champlain and is now on the beach below Fort Ticonderoga. After thorough drying and protection, the hulk will form the nucleus of a naval museum to be erected on the shore below the towering battlements of the fort. Other naval relics will be on display with it.

The hulk is that of the Trumbull , one of the fleet of sixteen ships built by order of General Benedict Arnold in 1776 to contest the British invasion which, one year later, culminated in Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga.

by Burke Davis. Rinehart & Company. 480 pp. $5.

For more than half a century, Colonel G. F. R. Henderson’s life of Stonewall Jackson has been a classic of Civil War literature, and Mr. Davis’s readable book does not assume to dislodge the earlier work from its place. It has merits of its own to stand upon, however —a fresh perspective gained from the broader knowledge and understanding of the War which have developed during the last generation or so, plus a good deal of information about Jackson’s pre-war career which was not available to the British writer. Old Stonewall appears here with all of his remarkable eccentricities and his even more remarkable speed and ferocity in battle, and the book seems likely to gain wide popularity.

by Paul Angle. Rand Mc-Nally & Company. 560 pp. $5.95.

In this book Mr. Angle has brought together some 46 of the most stirring and eloquent documents highlighting the long struggle for liberty in America, ranging all the way from the Mayflower Compact, through the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses and John Peter Altgeld’s noble protest to Grover Cleveland over the use of Federal troops in the 1894 Pullman strike, to President Eisenhower’s inaugural address. Each document is introduced by a page or two of text recounting the circumstances under which it was produced; and the whole makes an uncommonly valuable collection of some of the great, moving papers that have helped to shape American history.

by Bradford Smith. J. B. Lippincott Company. 303 pp. $3.95.

The great distinguishing mark of American life, says Mr. Smith, is the principle of voluntary association to gain a desired end. We are individualists, but we have an uncommon knack for working together, and it is this rather than a spirit of tooth-and-claw competition that is our greatest characteristic. This has meant, century after century, an increasing habit of getting together to get things done; Americans have always been “joiners,” and in the end that is why our democracy works so well. It is a dangerous freedom, perhaps, as de Tocqueville remarked, since it depends on the moral fiber of the citizens themselves. But Mr. Smith insists that it is a marvelously productive and promising freedom as well—that it is, indeed, the great thing America offers the world today.